2 minutes to read Posted on Friday June 21, 2019

Updated on Monday November 6, 2023

Collections Education Teacher-training Teachers Mooc A-school-year-with-europeana

Borbala Pocze

Sociology and Social Policy/Project Coordination and Pedagogy , European Schoolnet

Vanessa James

Public relations and digital communications , European Schoolnet

Bringing digital cultural heritage to classrooms: more than 38,000 students reached

Cultural heritage has an essential role to play in education, research and innovation, because it can enrich both formal and informal educational experiences. Since 2015, European Schoolnet (EUN) and the Europeana Foundation have been working together, sharing a common vision: to bring digital cultural heritage to as many classrooms as possible. Here’s what we’ve achieved together over the last year.

The Europeana Ambassador Network

With the support of its Education Ministries, European Schoolnet created the Europeana Teacher Ambassador network. The 13 selected Ambassadors, from 12 different countries (and the European Schools), have had the opportunity to develop and test pedagogical scenarios and learning activities, incorporating Europeana content. Their teaching materials are great examples of the integration of digital cultural heritage in the classroom, involving topics such as virtual reality, migration, propaganda, European identity and critical thinking. Made available under Creative Commons licences, the learning scenarios can be downloaded from the Future Classroom Lab repository and the Teaching with Europeana blog.

Discover what the Ambassadors have to say about Europeana:

The Europeana Education User Group

Composed of 130 dedicated teachers, the Europeana Education User Group provides the basis of the Europeana Education community. Its members create and test ready-to-use teaching resources using digital cultural heritage and share their experiences on the Teaching with Europeana blog.

The Teaching with Europeana blog

Built upon the teaching materials created by the Europeana Education Community, the Teaching with Europeana blog encourages teachers to share their experiences in incorporating digital cultural heritage in the classroom.

Updated every week, Teaching with Europeana is an ideal platform for teachers to:

Discover new learning scenarios and stories of implementation
Share their experience
Get feedback about their learning materials
Build a growing community

Since its launch in March 2019, the blog already counts:

114 uploaded learning scenarios
37 uploaded stories of implementation
70 published blog posts
473 comments

Massive Open Online Courses

The ‘Europeana in your classroom: building 21st-century competences with digital cultural heritage’ MOOC ran for the first time in English in 2018. Its updated version in 2019 counted more than 3,000 registrations - more than 1,000 more than the first version. The result of a post-course survey showed that 95% of the participants would recommend this course to their colleagues, and 95% now feel more confident in using digital cultural heritage in their classroom.

By following the Europeana MOOC, teachers learned about the importance of integrating European cultural heritage into education. They also developed and improved competences such as knowing how to navigate through Europeana Collections, and how to explore different Europeana tools, apps and resources. And, finally, how to build learning activities using Europeana Collections resources.

After receiving positive feedback, in March 2019 the MOOC has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and will be rerun next year in two additional languages as well as English.

With more than 44,000 students already reached, the Europeana Education Community will continue to work on reaching out to more and more classrooms in the 2019-2020 academic year!

See what students say about Europeana: